Montessori Inspired Writing Workshop

Hello All!  
It has been too long since I last wrote!  I just wrote a blog post for PreK and K sharing and you can find the post HERE.  I talked about how to start a writing workshop in a Montessori classroom.  The main thing is to instill a love of writing in a child at a very young age.  Writing can be a daunting task for children...and adults!  If you can find a way to make it fun and have meaning it doesn't feel quite so much like work.  

I think that in a preschool class having daily or weekly drawing workshops it teaches the children to draw with purpose.  Draw to tell a story.  This will get the child excited and begin the writing process.  Once the child is comfortable drawing with meaning then you add more complex steps such as labeling, writing a sentence using the labels and eventually a story.

Check out my post at PreK and K sharing and I promise I will write again very soon!  I have missed blogging and I am excited to be back!

Rachel Supalla

Writing Workshop Wednesday and Sensory Art Pond life

I just realized that I haven't done a writing workshop post in awhile.  I am posting pictures of a few things we did for writing this month.  We are working on descriptive writing using adjectives.  In the picture above we talked about the difference between frogs and toads and graphed it on a venn graph.  The children used those descriptions to make a sensory art with bumpy toads and smooth frogs.  I did not tell them how to spell the words they sounded them out using decoding skills. 

To make this sensory art I had small colored noodles and sand out to glue onto the toads.  For the frogs they made a collage of shiny foil paper. 

We started our writing on this day by labeling a pond.  The kids used the labels to write a sentence and draw a picture in their journals.  If you click here you can see our Monet art we made to extend our learning on pond life. 

On this day we worked together to make og family words.  This was a preschool writing workshop.  After we were done the children used the moveable alphabet to write the words.  You can see more of our frog works at this post HERE

This is what Allie wrote about frogs.  It is such a blessing to be able to homeschool while I am also teaching.  She is getting so much out of it and loves it too.  If you click here you can see where we homeschool when we are not at preschool. 

We also learned the op family and did word works to go along with that.  We played sight word swat with the word swatters and we also played number and sight word lily pad hop.  The children hopped like frogs onto sight words on lily pads that were called out.

Keep writing and reading interesting and fun always! 

Creating + Learning = FUN!

Word Work Wednesday Part 2 Valentine's Day

Word Work Wednesday Part 2

Valentine's Day Writing

We read this book

In the book it talks about all of the reasons why Mouse likes his friends. We used that as a springboard discussion to play the warm fuzzy game. Each kid drew a name stick from the jar and wrote a nice thing about the person on the stick. Everyone closed their eyes and one at a time a child stuck the post it on the friend they wrote about.  This was fun and went along with our kindness character trait. 

Then we read this book.

After we read the book we did an interactive writing activity.  We made a bubble map titled "If you give a mouse a Valentine"

The kids all wrote what they thought the mouse would want if they gave him a Valentine. 

They used their ideas from the bubble map to write their sentences.  When they were finished writing, they cut out hearts to display their work on.

We also practiced our cutting.

Here is our board to display their creative writing projects!

 

Word Work Wednesday Part one Groundhog day

This week our writing workshop was about Valentine's day and Groundhog day!  For Groundhog day we started with a story and a movement activity we danced to the song shadow dancing and then we found a partner and played "shadow does" It is just like simon says.  I read them Geoffrey Groundhog Predicts the weather.

They love to draw pictures and I really enjoy watching their creativity come out in their drawings, so we started with a drawing and labels. 

This one said that his groundhog forgot to brush his teeth haha too cute!

This one added the extra labels hole, and tooth.

If you look closely at these drawings you can see the 3 check marks for them to check their own work. I don't even have to remind them of this anymore.  We extended this activity by doing science experiments and art projects on shadows.  We went on a shadow hunt outside and measured our shadows throughout the day.  Finally, they all made a groundhog to attach with their writing paper.  I love how they turned out with so much personality! :) 

Part 2 of Word Wednesday will have our Valentine's day writing.

Let me know what your Groundhog day writing ideas are! :)

Word Work Wednesday!

Today is word work Wednesday!  On Wednesday's I teach Kindergarten.  We are working on writing labeling and writing 3 part stories.  We always start our day with journal time but recently I have been using that time to do our mini lesson on writing.  I forgot to take pictures of our anchor charts today.  Next week I will post all of our charts.  We started our mini lesson with a review on drawing, labeling and coloring a picture. 

Writing workshop, they are drawing, labeling and coloring a picture. I learned these ideas from Crystal at www.kreativeinkinder.blogspot.com  at the  Virtual Teaching Expo Everything K

Here is one of the pictures (these are in their journals so it is on wide ruled paper)

This student is extremely detailed.  You can clearly see he drew in pencil, labeled, and colored using at least 5 colors!  He is 5 years old!! 

Today our writing workshop was so much fun because usually I have them write a sentence and then illustrate what they wrote.  Today I told them to draw, label and color their picture and they didn't have to write a sentence.  They all wanted to write a sentence and did without me even telling them to!! 

Here is the sentence that goes with the picture above.  It says "Sneakers is planting the flowers."  The only thing I had him correct was the N needed to be lowercase and asked him to tell me what special sound was at the end of flower.  He remembered and corrected it on his own.  I love this!  "Sneakers" was our "elf on the shelf" ;) they still talk about him!!   

Later on in the day we had our writing lesson and our regular writing workshop where they are working on 3 part stories.  To help us remember how to write stories we have "Steve the Story telling caterpillar"  He is a puppet and we have him on one of our anchor charts. 

Steve the Story Caterpillar.  I read about Anchor Charts in the book Teaching with intention.

We brainstormed about how to write a story, then we did interactive writing and we all wrote a story together on the board.  After that everyone chose a title for their stories and began writing.  When they were finished I met with each of them individually to discuss their stories.  I was amazed and proud of their stories!!  They were so creative and original.  I will post them next week after they finish illustrating them. 

During our writing workshop and reading groups we had word works or literacy centers.  Here are some pictures of what we are working on.  Everything that is out on the language shelves is all review to them and they work independently. 

This is the Moveable Alphabet.  She is working on her "pink words" , they are 3 letter short vowel words.

This is the "insta learn board".  I believe this is an absolute must for every classroom and homeschool room!!  I could and should write a whole post dedicated just to this board.  Zack is working on spelling words with digraphs.  This board is leveled and self correcting. 

This little girl is working on long vowel, rhyming words.  The children have to figure out how to spell the words and it will not fit if it is spelled incorrectly.  The cards are color coded so they always know what level they are working on.  Like I said... A maz ing!!!!  They also have a math one, but that is for another day! :)

Sight word horse races from scholastic.

Letter and word poking (kindergarten does words and preschool does letters)

After I teach morning Kindergarten we go home and finish our day homeschooling!

This is Allie doing her word work, compound word magnets from the good ole' Dollar Store!! 

This is another fabulous Dollar Store find!  A word wall spinner with commands.  Allie LOVED this work!!

One of the commands on the spinner was to define a word, so we just expanded on this and defined several words. 

After that Allie chose a word in the dictionary to be her new vocabulary word.  We call those our magic words and she gets a sticker on her chart every time she uses the magic word correctly!

We do some type of "word sort" activity everyday.  This one is from Hillary Lewis at Rockin Teacher Materials  Her Spelling has improved 100% since we started doing word works!!! 

Allie finishing up her polar bear research report during our writing workshop. 

We finished up our day with writing workshop.  We also have anchor charts in our homeschool classroom but they are a little more advanced.  Allie has discovered that she does like to write stories when she knows how!!  Homeschooling for her has been such an incredible blessing!  Tonight, the last thing she said before she fell asleep was..."Thank you mommy for homeschooling me and always planning fun things to do!"  It just made my heart melt and all the late nights laminating, cutting and printing are so worth it!!! 

Sorry this post was so long, I guess I had fun writing and doing word works today too!!  I hope you enjoyed it too!

Our Homeschool Classroom...so far!

Here are the pictures of our homeschool room so far.  I am still going to add a few bulletin boards and white board and our centers will change throughout the year.  We also have an art center and unit studies/science/social studies center in our family room that I will post pictures of later.

This is our Art/Writing bulletin board and our writing workshop center.  I am eventually going to add our "I can" posters to the front of my cabinet

Allie's Desk and our meeting area.  I am adding a white board and learning board above the chart paper. 

These are our math and geography tubs.  The top row is math trays and those will change daily.  On top of the shelves is a Vocabulary work box and a dictionary.  I will be adding a pocket chart for Vocabulary and the bulletin board will be our math board.

Our Reading center.  Allie's goal is 50 books!  Everyday she will fill out the reading response page on the clipboard hanging by the bookshelf.  It will change daily with different reading response activities. 

Our Writers workshop center.  She will sit on the fitness ball to aid in movement while she works.  There are spelling activities, letter writing, stamp stories, sticker stories, sentence building, journal prompts, poetry, paragraph trains and recipe cards for writing recipes.  This center will change weekly with new writing activities.  So far this is her favorite one!!  Usually she hates to write!!

Workboxes

One of our math trays

Our Learning shelves, Games, curriculum book boxes, finished tray, finished early boxes and activities.

Our Lego table.  This will change with theme based activities. 

I am super excited to finally have this set up and ready to teach!!  It is going to be a great week.